Tibetan monks to spend this week creating a sand painting at FAU

Public is invited to watch them create a traditional Mandala

(Courtesy, Drepung Loseling…)

February 27, 2012|By Ariel Barkhurst, Sun Sentinel

BOCA RATON — A group of Tibetan monks began a traditional sand painting on Sunday, bent at 90-degree angles over a small wooden table as students, faculty and the public filed through the Florida Atlantic University art gallery to watch them work.

They've traveled from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in Atlanta to create the traditional artwork, called a Mandala, in order to spread happiness, said Lobsang Dhondup.

"That is the purpose of living the compassionate life, to help others or to create peace in people, cherishing others rather than cherishing self," he said.

The chosen Mandala, which will take the rest of the week through Friday to finish, is one of compassion, embodying the compassion of Buddha, Dhondup said.

There are different types of Mandala — wisdom is another — and there were others that were lost to history.

But that's not important, he said.

"It's all one Buddha, the same essence," he said. "There are many Mandala, but it is all the same Buddha."

The word Mandala in Sanskrit, the traditional language of the Tibetan monks, means cosmogram.

That means it represents both the inner and outer universes, which Tibetan thinking says reflect each other, said Clifford Brown, an associate professor of anthropology at FAU.

The monks, clad in traditional magenta robes and modern shoes, worked on the Mandala in the silent art gallery on Sunday afternoon using orange, pink, yellow, green, purple, teal, blue and white sands of different intensities.

They create a Mandala by applying sand a few grains at a time through a tool called a chakpur. All week while the monks work, a second sand painting table will be set up in the gallery for onlookers to try using the tool.

Dhondup and some of the other monks have created this Mandala "many, many times" before, he said, usually in a public setting in order to bring the art to others.

The school's Peace Studies program arranged for the monks to create the Mandala at FAU as part of a series of workshops and programs relating to peace running throughout the 2011-2012 school year.

The monks will destroy the painting on Saturday in a ceremony.

"That represents the impermanence of the universe," Brown said.

Half of the sand will be poured into a body of water on campus. The other half will be distributed to the audience of Saturday's closing ceremony.